As computing technology advances, people incorporate such technology more and more into daily life. Cell phones, smart phones, personal digital assistants, computers, laptops, and other smart devices are pervasive in today's world. Moreover, the Internet has become a global establishment that is omnipresent in the lives of many people. The Internet, in one aspect, is utilized a global communications medium through which humans interact for the purposes of business, education and/or frivolity. In addition, the Internet can be employed as a means to retrieve information retained all over the globe. To these ends, a plurality of Internet services is available to facilitate interactions, communications and/or information retrievals via the Internet. For example, such services can include, but not limited to, search engines, web mail, online chat (e.g., instant messaging), virtual environments and/or online games (e.g., massively multi-player online role playing games, multi-player games, etc.).
Many Internet services have become integrated into everyday lives of people. To accommodate increased integration, such services are expected to scale well, to provide high performance (e.g., low latency), and to be readily available. To achieve these goals, Internet services are typically deployed in clusters that include a large number of servers hosted in dedicated data centers. A data center can house a variety of heterogeneous components such as, but not limited to, computers, storage, networking equipment. In addition, the data center includes infrastructure that distributes power to the components and provides cooling to the components.
Viewed from outside, a data center can be seen as a black box that responds to a stream of user requests via the Internet while consuming power from the electrical grid and producing waste heat. With drastic increases in demand for Internet services, data centers consume more and more resources. The amount of resources consumed is directly related to number of hosted servers in data center as well workload of the servers. As data centers scale up to meet demand for hosted services, electricity usage skyrockets. In the United States, it is estimated that billions of kilowatt-hours are consumed by data centers; an amount sufficient to power millions of homes.